Active AimA Journey and Destination

About Brand Recognition

In any form of marketing strategy, brand recognition is usually the initial focus.

Business owners employ varying tactics to increase familiarity on their brand wherein the

ultimate aim is to create awareness about the existence of a given product or service.

This process will then produce a domino effect and impacts people trust of the product and

their decision on whether to purchase it or not.

Brand recognition can be achieved through various means though. Which is a good thing for

business owners because this means they do not have to allot large amounts of money in

order to get their brand recognized in the market. Awareness is of the essential in all

efforts for brand recognition. All other steps needed to be taken after that must be

looked at a different aspect, but this one serve its own purpose.

Importance of Brand Recognition

The reason might seem obvious but brand recognition offers multiple benefits for your

business. It is capable of impacting other aspects of your business, hence this is a

crucial determiner for success. Some experts have claimed that brand recognition is the

most important factor that could spell a business’ success potential.

However, the main importance of brand recognition is to establish a mental connection

between your business and its potential customers. Therefore, when your prospects hear

about your company or its name, they will be able to produce a general idea of what

products and services your business is offering.

With several similar business available, creating a distinction for your name in a given

field of business will encourage more people to do business with you. You also need to

consider the psychological aspect of it. Studies have revealed that people tend to go for

a name that they know or recognize. So, this is a helpful stat that you need to take

advantage of.

How To Increase Visibility?

If you’ve been working on a business startup, then chances are you already know the

importance of brand recognition and its role in the success of your business. But the

bigger question remains: how do you do it? Traditional marketing efforts for most company

involves major expenditures being set aside for increasing media presence such as

advertisement, to increase awareness of the product and create a connection between

consumers.

Today, there are a lot more avenue for that, in fact more interactive ones. Aside from the

traditional media outlets, the internet has opened up several possibilities to enable a

business to establish its name and potentially grow. Therefore, companies have also worked

on increasing their web presence to expand their market reach.

Studies have shown that most web surfers begin with a search. Therefore, it is best to

optimize your web site in such a way that it ranks well in the search engines. In short,

you have to make efforts to make your website easily found by potential web researchers.

That is why several companies invest in search engine optimization to improve their

performance and marketing strategies on the web.

Producing Strong Brands

The impact of brand recognition extends beyond purely marketing but also appeals to the

emotion of the consumers. In order to produce a strong brand that has established itself

on the industry, you must be able to purge favorable emotions from your customers. It is

one thing that largely impacts a consumer’s buying decision, so it pays to invest in an

effective brand recognition strategy.

The good thing about brand recognition is that it is not limited to giant companies. It

also offers substantial benefits for even small-scale businesses. As the the cliché goes,

familiarity breeds comfort. And when people have increased familiarity or brand

recognition, then they are most likely to feel confident about using your products.

Most online marketing “gurus” focus exclusively on getting traffic to your blog or website from sources like Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon and Digg. But before you jump into their strategy, consider a few of the following flaws with mass-media user-generated websites like MySpace and Facebook:

* Myspace and Facebook have a huge number of dead pages - So many users have “been there, done that” that they do not login to there accounts anymore. You would basically be marketing to the wall. * Myspace and Facebook has implemented numerous safety guards - They have made changes which are hypersensitive against spam, and they label any outgoing links as spam or potential phishing sites. This puts a scare into people using these services, and causes them to apprehensive to clicking any outgoing links to your site. * Social Networking is about dead - When these services were new, they were great. While you may find some amount of success with these sites, your effectiveness rate would be about 30% of what you would normally expect.

We might not like it, but it’s part of reality. Social media is huge, clunky and often innefficient. Most traffic from social media is very useless, as the visitors are more curious than interested in buying anything or subscribing to future updates. Bored traffic is rarely good traffic.

To respond to the many problems, some focus on SEO. SEO is the attempt to rank highly on search engine results for a keyword. This often results in steady traffic. But SEO can literally take years in competitive niches.

Perhaps the fastest and quickest way to drive traffic to your website using the search engines is through using pay-per-click advertising services, or PPC. PPC allows you to place an ad on the search engines based on the keywords which people search. You only pay for advertising when someone clicks through your ad. Three of the top PPC programs are:

Google –AdWords Yahoo - Search-Marketing MSN - AdCenter

There are other services such as Miva which is used often; and, incidentally, Facebook has an excellent PPC program, which seems to be highly targeted — it laser targets your potential visitors by age, interests, location, and much more. This ensures that the right audience is seeing your ads — maximizing exposure — and providing you with quality, fresh leads.

Rates vary from keyword to keyword, but some terms can be bought for as little as $0.05 cents a click. Pricing really depends on the search engine you advertise on and the amount of users the particular search engine has. It is also dependent on how many people are advertising in the same niche as you.

When a user clicks on your ad after searching what they were looking for, they go to your site. If your landing page is good, and rich in relevant content, more often than not a visitor will buy your product. This shows a considerable profit in ratio to advertising, or return on investment(ROI). With the millions of users around the world using search engines, you can get loads of visitors to your website through PPC advertising, and multiply your sales volume in the process.

If you are looking for a quick way to drive traffic to your website using the search engines, PPC is the most obvious route to take in your marketing endeavors.

Technorati Tags: business, facebook, finance, home based business, home business, internet marketing, make money online, Marketing, Money, myspace, online business, ppc, SEO, social media

About Internal Branding

Most companies focus entirely on promoting their brand to create a positive perception on

the consumer’s brand that internal branding loses its share of the formula. An important

share, at that. Marketing efforts are executed to establish a high-quality brand that

delivers to the needs and demands of the consumers. But how do you ensure that you are

delivering up to the standards of your company? This is where internal branding comes into

play.

To attain good quality products and services for your brand, you need to take care of your

business’ internal processes first. Internal branding is about the focus you give on

ensuring that practices and methods utilized in the creation of products or services meet

your company’s set of values. Branding must be done inside and out. You need to be able to

reproduce these values in the mind of everyone who is a part of the organization so you

can naturally promote your brand.

How Do You Achieve It?

You cannot produce a good marketing message to the public unless you start from within.

That is something every business owner need to realize. Therefore, you need to learn

strategies as to how you can effectively execute a sound internal branding system to

ensure a cohesive take on developing a brand that will satisfy your potential customers.
Here’s how you can do it:

• Gather together all of your development team work together in the development and

creation of the brand to ensure that all methods are synchronized with your values and set

of objectives laid out by the company.

• When hiring employees to work with you, choose those that are aligned with the corporate

values of your company. Having the right set of skills will enable you to achieve the most

effective brand representation you desire.

• Keep internal communication lines open at all times. This will enable you to reinforce

and enhance whatever existing values that are being executed to meet the promise of your

brand. If you keep nurturing this in the mind of the employees, then they will be able to

develop that soon enough.
Benefits of Internal Branding

Aside from unity in your company’s vision towards what you want to achieve with your

brand, internal branding offers more benefits. If you are not aware of the potential

benefits that internal branding offers, these are just a few ways that it can help boost

your brand’s campaign:

• Internal branding produces a healthy working environment and cohesive working culture.

Once all employees understand the vision behind the brand, all components of the company

are now geared towards the same goals.

• Internal branding produces a more consistent branding message. Once your brand have

established a given brand reputation, your employees will be proud to represent your

company while at the same time be challenged to meet its set of standards.

• Internal branding serves as an avenue to push for change.

• Internal branding develops your brand identity.
Basic Priciples

If you want to create an effective internal branding system, every company must give

attention to the following set of principles:

1.) Give freedom not control. An effective internal branding management is one that

emphasizes a set of rules that are agreed on by the employees, so they could genuinely

contribute to the advancement of your brand.

2.) Decentralize. Learn how to trust your employees to deliver the quality your brand

deserves.

3.) Communicate your company’s message to the personnel first before the customers. How do

you expect your employees to deliver the type of standard you want to achieve if they do

not have proper understanding of the company’s objectives?

4.) Synchronized operation. You need to be able to pull together different departments of

the company so that everyone works at the same pace and perspective.

5.) Think long-term goals. No brand is created overnight. Therefore, you need to create

that mindset in your personnel that enables them to think of the long-term impacts and

effects of an effective internal branding system

You can almost guarantee results from your advertising; it is as much a science as an art.

Is it possible to guarantee results form advertising? If you approach advertising as a science instead of an art results are fairly predictable.

In any case this is just an inquiry for the goods or service. This is real evidence your advertising is working and generating a return on investment.

But, in either case, it is just an Inquiry for the goods, of one sort or another. It is the first practical evidence that the money spent is earning something tangible in return.

The customer may take direct action and order by phone or online. If the customer visits a store there is three times the chance the she will be influenced by competing products. There may be less expensive alternatives or the salesman may earn a higher commission on other products. The copy must stand up to this influence.

The ad which pulls consumers into retail outlets must be as full of influence as profitable mail order advertising. The consumer must be fortified against substitution.

The ad must sufficiently influence the consumer to buy that product or they may go to the retail store and be convinced by the sales clerk to buy the sale item or one in which there is a sales contest. In this case the competition would benefit from our ads. Many proponents of branding, or name recognition are just drawing people into a store to buy substitutes. When Nike started advertising sports sandals Teva’s sales more than tripled.

The ad must give them a better reason to buy our product or service than he is likely to get from the Salesperson for the competitions goods that Salesman will want to substitute. It must give him this reason in such undeniable form that he can comprehend without effort, so absolutely that he will believe our reasoning Claims. It must accomplish this in spite of his natural distrust of all Ads statements. Therefore not more than 1/4 of those who, out of mere curiosity, buy the first package, through “branding” ever buy the 2nd or 3rd consecutive package of the same product. Because they do not buy on Conviction In the Meantime, it usually takes about all the profit in the first purchase of any “branding campaign” to pay the cost of introducing it to the Consumer through Advertising.

In contrast to branding “Reason-Why Advertising” or Salesmanship-on-Paper, results are insured and far more predictable. Consumers need only be convinced one time, through “Reason why advertising” or “Salesmanship- on-paper,” the product or service is best for them and their use.

Because, through General Publicity, his attention had only been “attracted,” not compelled and enduringly impressed with a logical understanding of these qualities. But, when once convinced in advance of purchase, through “Reason-Why” Salesmanship-in- Type, that the qualities claimed for the article do exist in them, he starts using that article with a mental acceptance of these qualities.

Conviction qualities in copy are shown, by test, to be just as necessary in Advertising design to sell goods profitably today, through Retailers to Consumers, as they are to sell goods direct by mail to Consumers. That is why every Advertisement for goods to be sold through Retailers (against substitution, and “Don’t keep-it” influences), should have as much positive selling force, “Reason-why” and conviction in it, as would be necessary to sell the goods by mail direct to Consumers.

Any Advertiser who uses mere “General Publicity” when he might have all that and, in addition, a positive Selling force combined with it is losing 50 percent to 80 per cent of the results he might have had from the same identical appropriation.

The difference in Results from Space in which this direct selling force of “Reason-Why” has been used, and in results from similar space filled with “General Publicity,” is often more than 60 per cent. Conclusive tests on Copy have clearly proved this, and preceding article cites a vivid example of it from actual experience

Technorati Tags: advertising, business, finance, Internet advertising, Marketing, print, promotions, small business marketing

Search engine marketing or SEM is all about driving traffic to your site. When you want to get people to come into your brick and mortar store you would put it in a good location, a place where everyone either drives by naturally or people gather for whatever reason. With the internet, your store front is your site, and it works completely the other way around. Traffic finds you not because of your location, but because your listed in the search engines.

Search engines scan every page on the web, every day, and rank sites based on an algorthm which is constantly changing. SEM or search engine marketers generally test several things out to figure out what works, what gives a site favorability in search rankings, and basically what puts a website above another in the search results. These marketers are very active in learning what works, testing over and over again, and typically apply everything they learn to their clients sites.

The best way to get your site on the map with search engines is to hire an SEM company to help you with both on and off page SEO (search engine optimization). Utilizing several tricks from how the sites are built to building natural and abundant back links (search engines call this link popularity) over time. With an SEM company taking care of the heavy lifting, you are free to build your business, or even generate another site to promote! Typically people outsource this service at first and after a while learn how everything works and start doing it themselves, but this is only people who enjoy the work. Many experts hire SEM companies to do the heavy lifting and to maintain their site and off page SEO concepts.

SEM companies can be likened to a rental property management company. The investor builds or buys the house and the management company takes care of your property so your free to do other things. Online the marketing is often the part you want to outsource to companies that do nothing but SEM/SEO and that are always ahead of the curve. Your investment is often replenished/recouped by sales made from the traffic they bring you by preparing your site and building back-links for you.

If your site is designed simply to send affiliate traffic to a site you make a commission on the sale (meaning you have no back end responsibilities, your sites job is simply to direct traffic and collect a commission on sales) then hiring a SEM company to do your marketing is not only a good idea for leveraging your time and a good investment of your money, but it is the best way to generate a profit. As a webmaster of an affilate network or your own product site, you should put your valuable time into building the sites or niche markets and leave the marketing to the experts who charge a nominal fee but their services drive tremendous traffic to your site which ends up paying for itself and a profit for you!

Technorati Tags: Marketing, search engine optimization, sem, SEO, seo services